


The Lessons of the Tree

by lostboywriting



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Murder, Trick or Treat: Trick, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-12-28 01:56:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21128879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lostboywriting/pseuds/lostboywriting
Summary: The cherry sapling was planted on a fresh spring morning, on top of an unmarked grave.





	The Lessons of the Tree

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Allekha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allekha/gifts).

The cherry sapling was planted on a fresh spring morning, on top of an unmarked grave.

It was a beautiful spot, atop a small grassy hill in a clearing deep in the forest. Only one person knew it was a grave, and that was the man who planted the tree. In the late autumn, just days before the ground froze, he had dug a deep hole, and into the hole he had lowered three bodies, wrapped in coarse cloth. Some sign of the digging had been left, of course; he had carefully cut away the sod, and put it back in place more or less intact afterwards, but it was impossible to do perfectly. But few people came by this way, and not too much later the first snows had covered all evidence.

More precisely, the man who planted the tree was the only living person who knew it was a grave. The three ghosts who lurked below, who had spent the winter howling curses at the man's name, certainly knew.

And some years later, when roots pushing down looking for food and water met bones pushed upwards by frost, the tree also knew.

The tree up to this time had known only a few things: sun and rain and soil rich with food, and the occasional wind rattling its branches. It was still young, and deep in the forest few people came by. It had not yet encountered hatchets or saws, only squirrels that sometimes scratched at its bark, or nibbled at its budding leaves in spring, and these troubled it only very rarely.

But the ghosts had spent a few years with nothing to do but listen to the whispering of the grasses and shrubs and trees above them. And so they crept up the cherry tree's roots, and whispered words it could understand, and it began to learn.

* * *

The first thing the tree learned was: "You can die."

It had no particular concept of this until the ghosts taught it, but it was not particularly difficult. It knew about slowing in winter, about leaves withering and falling as the days grew cold and dark, and about waiting in silence for spring to return.

"There will come a season when there is no spring," the oldest ghost murmured, as a way to begin. "Not for you, at least."

The tree considered this. It didn't mind winter. There was very little, from its perspective, to mind. When snow blanketed its bare limbs and the woods went still, it slept and did not dream. This was not unpleasant.

It voiced this opinion to the ghosts.

So the second thing the tree learned—from the youngest ghost this time, who reached up from the soil and wrapped her arms tightly around the base of its trunk and shivered and wailed as she spoke—was: "Some things, you must fear."

This one was a bit trickier. The tree, at first, only understood this shivering and wailing to mean high winds, but though it was still small it had grown stout and strong, and the winds it had encountered bore it very little threat.

"No," the ghost said. "No—imagine a wind so terrible it tears your roots from the ground and topples you helpless on your side, and you still know hunger and thirst but you can no longer eat or drink, and you never will, ever again. It is something more like that I am thinking of, when I shiver."

The tree was troubled. It did not quite understand this image, but it understood that the ghost was saying that things could somehow become _wrong,_ in a way that could not be made right. Still, it could not quite grasp the idea of this wrongness. Lying on its side, for one, was a foreign idea. There was up to the sky, and there was down into the ground, and there was the direction of the sun overhead and the direction of water below. Deep hunger and thirst, too, were things it could barely imagine; the soil in its clearing was rich, and drought had not struck in the tree's lifetime. It rarely wanted much.

"Think then of the teeth that sometimes nip at your budding leaves," the ghost said, "and imagine them large enough, and strong enough, to tear you in two." And so in long days and nights of stories, slowly spun so that the tree could keep up, she taught it of axes and those who wielded them, and of fires and those who set them, and of pain.

And slowly, as the stories piled up, the tree began to understand fear.

And so lastly, the middle ghost came to the now-frightened tree and told it: "If you could kill those who would do you harm, you would be safe from that fate."

This one took a great deal of time to understand.

The tree was not passive. It worked each day to reach a little further towards the sun in the directions that seemed best. It was ever expanding and maintaining its root system. It listened to the ghosts, and to the quieter murmurings of the other trees and plants around it—though the latter had faded, since the ghosts began to speak. All these things, as the tree saw it, took a good deal of active work. But it had no concept of direct interference in another creature's life, and it was baffled as to how it might manage this feat the ghost suggested.

"There is a poison you make by your nature, in your leaves and your wood and the pits of the seeds you will someday grow," the ghost said. "You already know well how to kill. It is only a question of making enough of the poison, and putting it where people will eat."

The tree considered this.

"In another year or two," the ghost added, "you will begin to bear fruit. That is when you must act."

Seasons passed as the tree thought; trees are not quick thinking. Winter fell. For the first time, as the air chilled and the ground froze, the tree thought about waking not to spring, but to the ringing of axes and the roaring of fire, and it feared.

The next spring, as it felt a swelling in its branches and its fruit began to grow, the tree said to the ghosts: "Help me understand how to do this thing."

They did.

* * *

There was still a thing the ghosts knew and the tree did not, and it was this: the man who had killed them visited once each year to see how the tree was growing. This year was no different.

He grinned widely when he saw the branches dripping with red cherries at last. He had waited; oh, he had waited. It was said the fruit of a tree planted atop a witch's grave, if eaten, would grant the eater all the power the witch had held—and here was the grave of not one witch, but three! And they had been powerful witches, too, but he had outwitted them in the end.

He reached up, and plucked a cherry from the branch, and ate it.

From beneath his feet, the ghosts watched, and smiled, and waited.


End file.
